History of Turin

The Torinese are
accustomed to absolutism. From 1574 Turin was the seat of the
Savoy dukes, who persecuted Piemonte's Protestants and Jews,
censored the press and placed education of the nobles in the
extreme hands of the Jesuits. The Savoys gained a royal title in
1900, and a few years later acquired Sardinia, which whetted
their appetite for more territory. After more than a century of
military and diplomatic wrangling with foreign powers, the
second monarch, Carlo Emanuele III (who promised to "eat Italy
like an artichoke"), teamed up with the liberal politician of
the Risorgimento, Cavour, who used the royal family to lend
credibility to the Unification movement. In 1860 Garibaldi
handed over Sicily and southern Italy to Vittorio Emanuele, and
though it was to take a further ten years for him to seize the
heart of the artichoke - Rome - he was declared king of Italy.

The capital was moved to Rome in 1870, leaving Turin in the
hands of the Piemontese nobility. It became a provincial
backwater where a tenth of the 200,000 population worked as
domestic servants, with a centre decked out in elaborate finery,
its caf? - decorated with chandeliers, carved wood, frescoes
and gilt - only slightly less ostentatious than the rooms of the
Savoy palaces. World War I brought plenty of work, but also
brought food shortages and, in 1917, street riots which spread
throughout the north, establishing Turin as a centre of labour
activism. Gramsci led occupations of the Fiat factory here,
going on to found the Communist Party.

By the Fifties Turin's population had soared to 700,000, the
increase mainly made up of migrant workers from the poor south,
who were housed in shanty towns outside the city and shunned as
peasants by the Torinese. Blocks of flats were eventually built
for the workers - the bleak Mirafiori housing estates - and by
the Sixties Fiat was employing 130,000 workers, with a further
half million dependent on the company in some way. Not
surprisingly, Turin became known as Fiatville. Today there are
fewer people involved in the industry, and Fiat's famous
Lingotto factory has been turned into a conference centre and
performance space, yet the gap left behind has been filled by
some of the biggest names from other industries, especially
those belonging to the worlds of textiles and fashion (Armani,
Valentino, Cerruti and Ungaro), publishing (Einandi and UTET),
and banking; the Banca Popolare di Novara is the most important
co-operative bank in Europe